Poker Affiliate: Site Set Up

Yesterday, I talked about how to become a poker affiliate to start building your passive income online. Today, I will be going over the basics of where to buy your domain and how to set up your site. Some details I will not be writing in this post as they are already provided for you. If you need help with anything just post your question below thanks.

Pick A Domain Name

Picking a domain name is where most people get stuck in the planning stage.  I will make this part easy for you. You want a domain base on your niche. There are 5 main niches you can go with for your site. I will break them all down for you.

Rakeback – If you just want to provide rakeback to players you will want “rake” or “rakeback” in the domain name so players know what your site is about before they even read anything else. However, you do want it to be short and easy to remember. So a two word domain name would be perfect.

VIP Program- If you just want to promote the online poker rooms where rakeback is not allowed and have nice VIP programs then you want “vip”, “vip programs”, or “vip rewards” in your domain name. You want something catchy where visitors can easily remember it and refer it to friends.

Strategy – If you planning to make a site that cover strategies of all poker games or just one then you want something with the word “strategy” or “strategies” in the domain name. If your site is going to be focus on one game then “poker game strategy” or “poker game strategies” (ie. texasholdemstrategy.com) would be best.

Poker Training – If you are a winning poker player and have no trouble with teaching others then this maybe your best bet. These sites have proven to be one of the highest earning sites because your players are always getting better from your teachings. With these type of sites you can either put the poker game name in the domain name, use the keyword phrase “poker training” or “poker coaching” in the domain name, or just make a brandable name thats poker related.

Poker Community – If you like to get to know your players and interact with others then this is the way to go. (This is the way I went since I am really friendly) However, this will take a lot more of your time than the others. You will have to get a forum going (this include hosting, making a subdomain, and forum software), recommend books, training sites, and etc. If you don’t know what you are talking about believe someone will call you on your bullshit. As for the domain name, anything poker related will do.

Where To Buy Domain Name

The place I highly recommend and I have been using for years is namecheap. They have a very user friendly backend and great support. They also make transferring domain names easy to do. (You know just in case you want to sell your site later) You don’t need to worry about hosting because your site will be hosted on poker affiliate solutions servers.

Now log into your PAS account and click here follow the instructions to add your domain to the system. Once you have your domain added to the system and picked your layout. You can use the PAS layouts for now until your site is earning enough for a custom design or you can pay for a custom design right at the beginning. I recommend using eyenod or poker website solutions. Either way both will cost you around $500 to $700 depending on what you want done for your site.

URL Structure

Starting out the rakeback review/signup pages the url will look like this “url.com/rakeback/pokerroom.html” now as you can see if you used “rake” or “rakeback” in your url. This does not look good. It kind of looks like you keyword stuffing your urls’.

The worst url I have ever seen was someone using a subdomain for their site. The url look like this “rakeback.rakebackword.com/rakeback/pokerroom-rakeback.html”

You don’t want that for your site. You want everything to be clear for both your visitors and search engines. Here are my suggestions.

For sites using “rake” or “rakeback” in the domain

• domain.com/pokerroom.html
• domain.com/review/pokerroom.html
• domain.com/reviews/pokerroom.html

For sites not using “rake” or “rakeback” in the domain

• domain.com/pokerroom.html
• domain.com/pokerroom-rakeback.html & domain.com/pokerroom-bonus.html for non rakeback deals.
• domain.com/review/pokerroom.html
• domain.com/reviews/pokerroom.html
• domain.com/rakeback/pokerroom.html & domain.com/bonus/pokerroom.html for non rakeback deals.

From a SEO standpoint I believe shorter is better. So I went with “domain.com/pokerroom.html” But its all up to you what you want to do with your site. To make these changes to your url’s hover your mouse over content then page routing then click on your site. Click on “create custom page routing” and remember do not add the “http://” when typing in the new url.

Ok, now on to blocking search engines from areas of your site. I know what you thinking. “Why on earth would I want to do that?” Well its simple, some things should not be indexed. Also, you don’t want to get hit with duplicate content when your players use their affiliate link.

So go to your robots.txt file and place this in your file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /members/
Disallow: /user-login/
Disallow: /signup-forms/
Disallow: /member_session/
Disallow: /member_tickets/
Disallow: /rakeback-news/

This keeps search engines from going places they shouldn’t and block any indexing of these pages. However, I do not recommend blocking the news if you are posting your own news. Now 2 things left to do adding your google analytics code and adding your site to google webmaster tool.

First go to google analytics and add your site to it. It will give you a code to add to your site. Click on “Setup Google Analytics” in your backend and add your code there. Remember to click save. Now head over to google webmaster tools and add your site by following the instructions. That’s it for today, tomorrow I will be going over SEO and Content.

If you haven’t got started go to poker affiliate solutions and sign up to today. If you don’t want a website, then join my rakeback site and use the referral center. And for those of you that may quit after starting your site, I will buy your site if it has active players. (not including yourself)